Members of the Tripoli University and Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontology team in the Sahara Desert in January. / Chris Beard / Carnegie Museum of Natural History

by Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

by Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Once the Sahara Desert bloomed, a vast plain filled with curious creatures, crocodiles, elephants and the spindly predecessors to today's monkeys, apes and people.

Now, a first scientific expedition to post-revolution Libya has returned with some news of humanity's earliest ancestors from that desert. Despite the horrific Sept.11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the expedition team says Libya offers the promise of a once-forbidden corner of the world filled with hidden discoveries opening to future exploration once more.

"The scientists there, most people there, with the civil war over, they want a return to normalcy, and lives that are part of the wider world," says expedition paleontologist Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

Near Libya's Zallah oasis, some 800 miles deep in the sand-draped Sahara Desert, "We found a wonderful new location, unknown to scholars, that offers us a unique window on the past," Beard says.

Beard and his Libyan colleague, geologist Mustafa Salem of the University of Tripoli, were among the authors on a 2010 Nature journal report that looked at the Dur At-Talah escarpment, a cliff running more than 100 miles across the Sahara. They reported at that time discovery there of three new species of 38 million-year-old early monkeys called "anthropoids." The finding added weight to the notion that these early ancestors of ours were themselves descended from even earlier monkeys that had made it to Africa from Asia at a time when the continent was an island, like Australia is today.

It took Beard more than three years to receive a visa for the 2010 report expedition, granted in the waning years of dictator Moammar Gadhafi's reign. After the revolution, things were easier in some senses, says Beard. "Professor Salem just invited me in and said he had permission from the Libyan oil company to explore near one of their facilities," he says.

But in other ways, of course, things were more complicated. The U.S. State Department has a travel warning in place that advises against all but essential travel to Tripoli, reflecting tensions after the September embassy attack. The Zueitina Oil Co. provided the team with a chartered airplane flight to their facility, which greatly eased security and housing worries.

So, in January, he and his colleagues flew from Tripoli to an oil facility 186 miles away in the Sahara desert. There they found signs of a more bountiful Sahara thousands of years ago, rock engravings depicting elephants and giraffes carved by people living at a time when the desert more closely resembled today's Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania, home to wildebeest, zebras and lions.

Of course, just about the time of the expedition in January, Islamist militants seized a natural gas facility in nearby Algeria, a crisis that left three Americans dead among 38 other workers killed before its conclusion on Jan. 19. "There were some tense days (in Libya), but the oil company took security very seriously," Beard says, even sending pickup trucks armed with machine guns to accompany the group for safety.

What the expedition sought, and found, was a fossil outcropping dating even further back in time, to more than 28 million years ago, one of only three such sites now known in Africa. "At the time it was on the coast," Beard says, and the site was initially found bearing fossils of a crocodile, turtles and - more reassuringly for an expedition looking for land creatures - rodent teeth. Aside from elephants, the creatures dwelling in the region were mostly much less familiar "Afrotherians," the ancestors of today's aardvarks and related creatures such as manatees. "Probably it was more like the Everglades are today," Beard says.

But on the expedition, they did find some more familiar creatures, including the oldest African carnivore yet discovered, an ancestor to today's lions, jackals and cheetahs, as well as hyenas.

And they found more evidence of anthropoids, "aspirational apes," Beard says, whose descendants millions of years later would include today's gorillas, chimps and people. The creatures from the site look different from ones seen at two similarly old fossil sites in Egypt and on the Red Sea, as well as the older ones reported earlier in the 2010 report. That suggests that patches of tropical forest separated by less accommodating plains once marked the Sahara coast, allowing different species to arise from earlier migrants from Asia. "What we have is a spectacular place to look at evolution in this time," he says.

The Libyan desert had always been a forbidding place to scholars. Ancient Greek myths made the locale the home of the legendary Medusa, whose sight turned men to stone, tied to the petrified forest that covers hundreds of square miles there. World War II and Gadhafi's reign had closed the region to outside researchers, aside from an older generation of professors, such as Salem, educated in Western universities until Cold War politics shut the door.

"Most of the population lives on the coast, and there are vast regions that are isolated and undisturbed offering perfect laboratories for investigation," concludes Beard. "There is tremendous interest there in more collaboration with the outside world. I can't wait to go back."

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